rush                                            out with skydiver’s abandon

to signage,                                its alphabet-like runes/

like scars etched                      within

withal the long body of           an older country;
this station, its                          broken
compass pivot                          on paleolithic croplands

thistle-green                            knobbles of sheep scat,
& ozone. she,                            guarding her story well:
your mother, hunkered           in flicker, on platforms

underground after                   bombs rubbled the surface;
your father:                              from his open boxcar,
hunger/fields/bones/             bodies like cargo

torqued him onward               to a frostbitten prison,
in Stalinist tundra;                   then you, here, now,
just you, will cross                   a footbridge to a railway,

all that chunk                            of slow wheels
& hiss, locomotives                 speaking
in a language of coal/              steam, their grammar

lurching backward,                  their syntax drowsing
inward. you, just                      a primitive
part of speech, a                      morpheme

split from voice                        urgent as hunger

into quarry-sweat-shit            while trains
across a buckled continent    haul

the freight of your                   engine-metal-sorrows & teeter

legs astride the aisle                to plumb just one horizon

for prayer & slumber               chanting rock /hurt /iron /go.